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Minutes, Meetings, and ‘Modes of Existence

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Minutes, Meetings, and ‘Modes of Existence The University of Manchester Research Minutes, meetings, and ‘modes of existence. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.12598 Document Version Accepted author manuscript Link to publication record in Manchester Research Explorer Citation for published version (APA): Evans, G. (2017). Minutes, meetings, and ‘modes of existence. Navigating the bureaucratic process of urban regeneration in East London. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(1), 124. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12598 Published in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on Manchester Research Explorer is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Proof version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Takedown policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the University of Manchester’s Takedown Procedures [http://man.ac.uk/04Y6Bo] or contact [email protected] providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. Download date:02. Oct. 2021 Meetings: Ethnographies of organizational procedure, bureaucracy and assembly Minutes, Meetings and 'modes of existence': navigating the bureaucratic process of urban regeneration in East London GILLIAN EVANS University of Manchester Inspired by Latour’s aim to restore balance to the anthropological project by exoticising the artefacts and procedures of so-called ‘modern knowledge’, this essay gives an ethnographic description of emergent processes of knowledge production in the context of the planning and development of urban regeneration in London. Bureaucratic meetings are described as part of the organizational infrastructure that enables the crafting of new urban futures, and it is argued that, because the making of reality is always seen to be forward moving, there is a need, as in navigation, to plot a course. The essay focuses on the subversive potential of informal meetings, and argues, more generally, that meetings are the materially social, and affectively technical, manoeuvres that make possible direction-finding, and contestation about the way forward.. Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. Weber 1968: 273 The haunting: East London, November 2014 1 Meetings: Ethnographies of organizational procedure, bureaucracy and assembly Mark looks gaunt this time: he is worn down and worn out: weary with battle. One won. One lost. On my way to meet him, I see the evidence of his victory: an open space – bare earth, and black topsoil – in plots. Underneath darkening skies, a crop of lonely looking sheds stands out, brand-new, incongruous against the cluttered backdrop of more usual urban forms. Faded high-rise council flats, bright new apartments, and a hotchpotch of Victorian industrial buildings make a skyline for the ground. And, leading the eye away, the tangled traces of infrastructural flows – canal, railway, and road. The significance of this – this scratch of earth – is not lost on me. As the train I am travelling on goes by, I want to stand up, cry out loud, declare Mark’s victory to fellow-passengers: ‘He did it; they’ve done it: they won. Look at the sheds! Look at the plots!’ But I say nothing, and sit quietly, containing my excitement as the train passes, and I look backwards, until the space is out of sight. When I see him, I want to celebrate with Mark, but for the moment, he thinks only of the defeat he has suffered. Trying to make sense of it, he talks it through, and we walk, in a light rain. The minutes Mark is meticulous: the minutes of each meeting of the Manor Garden Allotment Society are kept carefully in individual, transparent wallets, and all of them are contained, in date order, in bright Lever-Arch files whose weight substantiates the passage of time: duration marked, one gathering after another. In amongst other 2 Meetings: Ethnographies of organizational procedure, bureaucracy and assembly business, a fight is documented: the evidence of a long struggle. Seven years, and counting … Mark wants me to see everything: to bear witness. Not to take sides, but to explain, and make public. He is a good secretary: exceptional, consumed by an order of business that far exceeds the administration of the day-to-day activities of the Society. Increasingly complex technicalities make it hard for Mark to keep pace with, and adapt to, the evolution of the conflict that members are engaged in, but he is relentless, determined, in a voluntary capacity, to serve the members well, manage his day job – crafting the wooden containers in which priceless works of art are transported from London galleries around the world – and, meanwhile, to tend his own plot, and make time for family life. His efforts are heroic. To be sure, the usual, summarized account of the management of the decision- making process is there, the evidence recorded of the standardized repetition of rules that, as if by magic rite, allows the Society, comprising eighty-one members, to know itself as a single entity, a collective body, acting as if one (Schwartzman 1989). However, what strikes me is the personalization which punctuates the standardized formality of the minutes: ghosts of dead members hang about the pages, and, in between the lines, a lament about insufferable displacement from the land. For example, the spring 2015 reports: ‘A minute’s silence was held in tribute to Reg. Hawkins who passed away recently. President remarked on how Reg. had been one of MGS’ [Manor Gardens Society’s] longest standing members, and noted the excellence of his allotment gardening’. Similarly, at the Extraordinary AGM in the winter of 2013, to discuss how to respond to confirmation of the breaking of the promise by the London Borough of Waltham Forest to provide land for the allotment-holders within the Olympic Park, priority is first given to respect for deceased members: 3 Meetings: Ethnographies of organizational procedure, bureaucracy and assembly A minute’s silence was held in tribute to Pat Lemming who passed away recently. Chair remarked on how Pat had always put the Society’s survival at the forefront of the agenda. Pat will be remembered for her stoic support of the Community, and for carrying the sound of laughter wherever she went. RIP Pat. And, at the AGM, in the autumn of 2012, when first mention is made of the notification that the planning obligation may not be honoured by the London Borough of Waltham Forest to provide 2.1 hectares of allotment land at Eton Manor in the northeast of the Olympic Park, Mark notes in the minutes that the Manor Gardens Allotment Society ‘had fought for five years to be relocated back into the Legacy Park as per the approved plans and through our own consultations had a Manor Gardens Society members’ mandate which cited return to the Park, in 2.1 hectares as mandate’. Mark notes in the minutes that in a meeting with Waltham Forest he had ‘expressed no room for negotiation’, and, immediately after, he records the sad passing of Charlie Wilbourne and Ron Webb, ‘both of whom will be remembered as seasoned members of our gardening community for many years. RIP’. Because we, too, are modern subjects of the polite procedures of congregation, we all of us understand these rules, and embody the stylization of the elite about what constitutes proper conduct in social gatherings (van Vree 1999). Of course, people take it in turns to speak, discuss one issue at a time, hold back from personal attack, and, in formal meetings, where collective goals, and ways of achieving them, are to be decided upon, they assume, on matters about which there is disagreement, that a majority vote will be taken whose outcome is to be accepted, in good faith, as the shared will of those assembled. In this way, modern meetings, in contrast to the proceedings of the early 4 Meetings: Ethnographies of organizational procedure, bureaucracy and assembly modern and medieval courts that preceded them (Elias 1983 [1939]), make parliamentarians and good citizens of us all. Through the cultivation of democratic processes of self-inhibition, meetings contain the time-consuming chaos of contestation, and disorganized discussion, so as to manage, non-violently, the social process of decision-making as the proper expression of a polite society organized in terms of civility and rational efficiency (van Vree 1999). Ideally, by leaving out the personal details of who said what to whom, minutes of meetings purify the written record. Emotional content is eliminated from the description of the meeting; so, too, are the subjective vagaries of interpersonal dynamics. The record shows, instead, a summarized set of collectively agreed decisions about those specific issues which, at any time, preoccupy an assembled group whose members have in common shared goals linked to a specific environment external to the group itself, which, in this case, is the land – the plots, the garden allotments. On this basis, anyone inspecting the minutes ought to be able to conclude not only that those assembled, through the documentation of meetings, are held accountable, retrospectively, for what they decide, but also that under the same conditions it comes to appear to be the case that any other reasonable group of people would have reached the same decisions. The meetings, then, constitute the Society – here, the Manor Gardens Allotment Society – as a collective body, a single entity, and the minutes, through a de-personalizing process of purification (Latour 1993), ideally ascribe to that entity the modern capacity to act objectively.
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